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Decision Procedures for Automating Termination Proofs

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Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation (VMCAI 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 6538))

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Abstract

Automated termination provers often use the following schema to prove that a program terminates: construct a relational abstraction of the program’s transition relation and then show that the relational abstraction is well-founded. The focus of current tools has been on developing sophisticated techniques for constructing the abstractions while relying on known decidable logics (such as linear arithmetic) to express them. We believe we can significantly increase the class of programs that are amenable to automated termination proofs by identifying more expressive decidable logics for reasoning about well-founded relations. We therefore present a new decision procedure for reasoning about multiset orderings, which are among the most powerful orderings used to prove termination. We show that, using our decision procedure, one can automatically prove termination of natural abstractions of programs.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland

    Ruzica Piskac

  2. Institute of Science and Technology (IST), Austria

    Thomas Wies

Authors
  1. Ruzica Piskac
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  2. Thomas Wies
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. UC San Diego, USA

    Ranjit Jhala

  2. Department of Computing and Information Sciences, Kansas State University, 234 Nichols Hall, 66506, Manhattan, KS, USA

    David Schmidt

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Piskac, R., Wies, T. (2011). Decision Procedures for Automating Termination Proofs. In: Jhala, R., Schmidt, D. (eds) Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation. VMCAI 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6538. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18275-4_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-18275-4_26

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-18274-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-18275-4

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